Edited By: Jordan Pavlin

Jordan Pavlin, the editor of CAST OF SHADOWS shares her thoughts on the book.

I remember the first time I read Kevin Guilfoile's novel CAST OF SHADOWS. My husband was away, my two small children were at last soundly asleep, and I settled into my favorite reading chair with Guilfoile's manuscript, thinking I would read the opening chapters and then call it a night. With the exception of jumping up to check the locks on my doors, and peering into the darkness of my son and daughter's rooms with increasing anxiety, I stayed put for the next four hours. When I finally climbed into bed the sun was nearly up, and I lay there with my pulse racing, wishing for daylight.

Whether one is reading suspense or literary fiction --- or a novel like Kevin's uniquely gripping, genre-bending thriller, which has elements of both --- this sort of reading experience is exactly what every editor (and reader, too) lives for: these interludes of total surrender and immersion, the feeling that one has entered another world so completely that when the last page is finally turned the sensation is of exiting a theater into bright sunlight, amazed to find the world unchanged. I had had this feeling before, of course. I had it when I read Ann Packer's novel THE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN'S PIER. I had it when I read Allison Pearson's I DON'T KNOW HOW SHE DOES IT and Sue Miller's novel WHILE I WAS GONE. And I had had a variation of it with short stories by Nathan Englander and Julie Orringer. But I had never, reading any novel, experienced the sort of bone-chilling unease I felt reading CAST OF SHADOWS. Still more significant: this wasn't cheap terror, thrilling as that can be, as one often feels reading suspense novels. This was something deeper and more unsettling, a darker menace: terror engendered by questions about what it means to be human, what it means to create life, what it means to have a soul.

I admire Kevin's writing, and I admire his gifts as a storyteller. But what remains most striking to me about CAST OF SHADOWS is the skill which he has taken what appears to be a straightforward page-turner and woven spectacularly important questions through it about good and evil, biology and destiny, about whether and how our increasingly sophisticated understanding of genetics changes our perception of human possibility, of innocence, of childhood itself. A powerful reading experience, yes, but not only that: also one that challenges our assumptions about who we are and what we may become.

This is a novel I feel I have lived with, in a variety of ways, for a long time. On the road to the book's publication key elements of the plot were discussed at length and revised, and we must have considered and rejected at least 20 versions of the book's jacket. Kevin and I have traveled a long way together since the night his manuscript haunted me so deeply in my New York apartment, and had me gazing down with such jangled distress at the faces of my sleeping children. It was thrilling, last week, to open the first box of bound books, to see this novel in its scarlet slipcase and gorgeous red foil jacket. Whatever happens from here on in, this has already been one of the most gratifying experiences of my career.

   --- Written by Jordan Pavlin

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